Just Wondering - Series Books Conundrums

This post by Manitowoc (WI) Public Library Youth Librarian and YSS Board Member Susie Menk explores series books in doing cataloging and collection development. And she's wondering....what do you think? 

So today I would like to talk about series.  We all know how much our young patrons love to read books that are part of a series.  My question is—how do you catalog a series when there are multiple authors?  Or what about series that end up in your non-fiction collection?  What about weeding in a series?  What do you do if one book of the series doesn’t circulate but the rest do?  Do you break up the series?

Series books can be great ways to get kids to read.  Just yesterday, I had a young patron pick a free book from our prize bin for our Winter Read-a-thon.  She ended up picking a book based on the fact that it was the first book in a series and we owned the rest of the books in the series.  Awesome!  But series can be complicated.  How to catalog them, how to arrange them on the shelf, how to weed them and how to help patrons find them can make series difficult to manage.  

One thing I have found that helps me is checking to make sure the series statement is added to the catalog record.  When trying to help patrons find books in a series, it can be crucial to their searching that all the books in the series have the same series title.  We recently were looking at our Babysitters Club books and realized that our series titles had been inputted into the catalog in several different ways.  This makes it hard for a patron to find out which books in a series a library actually owns.  We try to clean up these issues in the catalog as soon as we find them. Now, when I catalog new books, I double check the series statement and make sure it gets added and that it’s the same for the whole series.  My worst nightmare is the Erin Hunter series and subseries.  They are one of the hardest series to search for, so making sure we have subseries listed in the catalog record helps.

Another issue is when a new book gets catalogued the publisher or OCLC record doesn’t always indicate that the book is part of a series.  So it’s important that when the second book in a series gets catalogued, you go back and double check that the first book has a series statement in the catalog record as well.  

Series that are written by the same author are easy to catalog since they just go under the author’s last name.  What about series by different authors like “39 Clues” or “Guys Read” or “American Girl”?  How do you catalog them so they are all together on the shelf?  As librarians we love to use the alphabet—books are on the shelf in alphabetical order according to the author last name.  Simple, right?  But how will patrons find all the “39 Clues” books if they have to find all the different authors?  The simplest solution is to catalog these types of books by a series title.  I have found that if you share your system with patrons, they understand and appreciate being able to find series books all in the same location. 

Then there is the issue of a series being in non-fiction.  In recent years there have been a few new non-fiction series that I have been sharing with patrons such as the “Who was…” series and the “You Choose” series.  Since these series are non-fiction they are not always shelved together.  Patrons love these books, but they struggle with how to find more of them.  They expect that they will be in the same place on the shelf and that is not usually the case.  So do you disregard the Dewey Decimal system and catalog the books together so they are on the same shelf or do you spend time educating your patrons in how to do a series search in the catalog?  This is one issue where I could go either way.  At this point in time, my library has chosen to stick with the Dewey cataloguing.  Instead, every time I recommend these series to patron, I make a point of showing them how to do a series search in the public catalog.  Once they learn how to search for a series, they can look them up on their own and that is empowering.  

Then there is the weeding issue.  We run our lists for weeding items that haven’t been circulating and we find that a book on our list is part of a series.  Several books in the series are circulating just fine, but one or two are not.  What do you do?  Do you keep the whole series? Do you weed just the books that don’t circulate? Or do you get rid of the whole series?  It’s a dilemma.  My library is part of a six library system, so the first step I take is to check and see if a specific book is available at another library in my system.  I also might look on WISCAT and see if the title is available through our inter-library loan program.  I want to make sure that even if I discard my library’s copy of a book, a patron would still have access to the title from another library.  I used to be an all or nothing person—either we kept the whole series or discarded the whole series.  I since have found that as long as we can get a copy of a title for a patron from another source, I can discard titles within a series without discarding the whole series.  

So what are your favorite tips or tricks for working with series?  Love them? Hate them?  Ambivalent?  I would love to hear how you and your patrons find and enjoy series books.